The state of the Linux desktop
The Linux desktop is in shambles. I don't mean to be critical of all the hard work in this space, but it's getting worse, not better. It peaked in the later stages of KDE4 and Unity. Now KDE5 isn't useable and Canonical indicated they're no longer developing Unity. I'll be the first to admit I was a KDE fan, and I'd highly recommend Unity to family and friends for more casual use. KDE5 completely burned down KDE4 and started over with the new QT5 toolkit and Plasma desktop. At first glance, it looks a lot like KDE4, until you try to customize something the way you had it on KDE4 -- it's not possible. Kwin crashes every hour, but, luckily development went into restarting it as quickly as possible after it crashes, so, it's more of a "blink." Don't like the icon spacing on the desktop? Want smaller taskbar and desktop icon fonts? Were window shadows important to you? Did any of your favorite apps port to QT5? How does it feel to want? KDE5 misses the mark on these seemingly trivial features, but there are so many, they all add up to an unusable desktop. I refuse to migrate, so I'm stuck on KDE4 and an old version of Ubuntu. At least LTS releases last seven years.
So what did we learn? Taking a radical new approach to your project is natural, inevitable and fun. Just keep in mind in the IT industry, if you make a change, never leave your users with less than what they had before. If you take a new direction, don't take away seemingly trivial features, or people will not follow you. You'll be developing a hot new technology that nobody wants, because it doesn't give them the functionality they had before. Also, "clever" is not "better." Many clever changes are for the sake of being clever, with a huge wake of unintended consequences, with stability often being the first to go. Flexibility and ease of use are two qualities which tend to vary inversely. Know your audience in this regard, and cater to one, but not both, or you'll lose both. Linux could/should boil down to two leading desktops in the end.
For completeness, I've tried all the "new stuff" out there like Cinnamon, xfce, Gnome, Pantheon, and ElementaryOS, the majority of which are a fresh coat of paint on the tired Gnome/gtk desktop.
So what do you use and why?
Alt+F2 for easy searchability made me stick with XFCE. No nonsense, just lots of options without too much bling-bling
I've been using Leap42.2. It's solid and updates very easily using zypper. I run it in a VM on OSX. It ran when others didn't including the popular Linux Mint. I appreciate what you succinctly said. I've had similar experience with Linux over the years. Like you said it appears someone wanted clever, not better. I'd be interested in your thoughts of Kali Linux.